Good UX Design Starts With Defining Users
When we start a webdev project, good UX design must be foremost in our minds from the beginning. And good UX design begins with empathy: We must design the entire user experience to fit the type of person who will be using it most. This determines who we’re really working for. The client may be paying for your time and expertise, but the real “boss” — the one driving our decisions and choice s— is the user. So it’s necessary to define our actual user base.
For any website, there are actually two main types of users:
- External (Customers/End users)
- Internal (Content Editors)
Every web designer knows of and thinks about the first category, the end user. But if we’re going to be designing for successful, long-life websites, we need to consider the fact that all such sites will be continually updated at least with content, if not functionality. That means someone inside the client’s organization, or at least someone contracted by them, will also be using the site from the back end.
Web developers need to build interfaces to function well, for visual attractiveness, and clean coding. They must serve each of these user sets, so the users must be defined in as much detail as possible, to set up expectations. We’ll discuss specifics in our next post.